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14 Comments on “According to my messages, my stats are booming! (Booming–seriously??!) And I have new friends viewing my page on LinkedIn. ”

Hi Cathy! I’ve followed your case closely because I had the pleasure of knowing your wonderful family! We lived a couple of doors apart on Pembroke. You played with my daughters, Lisa & Linda, and you and your brothers swam in my backyard pool. I even babysat with Tim on occasion. I was working in Florida when this heinous crime occurred. I was amazed to pick up the St. Petersburg Times one morning and see a large picture of your mom on the front page although I had been informed about what as going on by Linda by long distance phone. Although law enforcement has screwed up royally, it seems that your family has solved the case on its own and you know who the perpetrator was. He is dead and perhaps he is being judged by someone higher than us. I hope you and your family can gain some peace from those facts. My best to Chris and Mark and your Dad. Keep on writing! Ann Martin

First of all, as a kid growing up in Birmingham at that time, I remember this all first-hand, and you and your family have my deepest sympathies.

Indulge me a bit as I summarize my thoughts:

1. The fact that the FBI “handled” the investigation into the North Fox Island ring and the fact that almost nobody went to jail for anything tells me that the FBI botched it – they probably thought they could go after the “big fish” but before they nailed the bigwigs, something happened . . . the murders of four little kids were connected to the very ring they were investigating! Their solution? Shut it all down and make everything go away. CYA – SOP for the Bureau.

2. In the fall of 1976, Jill’s sister, Alene Strole, was approached by a man a few months before Jill’s abduction, and Alene said this man was “close to composite sketches” of the OCCK suspect. That’s probably not a coincidence – it was probably the same guy, and probably Greg Greene. His “approach” (“hey kid, show me how to get to your school” . . .) is likely the same one used on her sister, Jill Robinson.

3. Greene and Chris Busch were both arrested on rape/molestation/exploitation/etc. charges in January of 1977, and only Greene gets life in prison. Busch walks out with a suspended sentence. Obviously, Busch had a card to play with the authorities that Greene did not have.

4. Busch was named in 1977 in the Traverse City Record Eagle as the photographer in the North Fox Island ring – the same ring “investigated’ by the FBI, but nothing came of that . . .

5. Greene, in a transparent attempt to plead his way down from the CSC charges in Flint in January of 1977, tells the Flint PD that Busch murdered little Mark Stebbins. (Maybe true, maybe not, but the Flint PD suspect that Greene himself did it!) The Oakland County prosecutors were sure that they had the right guys – Busch and Greene – and the case/s would be closed. So said Richard Thompson. But no! Those two are innocent, said the Michigan State Police! They passed a lie-detector test! (Really???) Busch walks. . . But the test was incompetently given, and the MSP isn’t incompetent . . . sooooo, the test was given in such a way to guarantee an inconclusive result. And that was done to protect someone. (Hint to any new readers: an informant.)

6. You wrote once that the Flint records were a mess, and that while the official story was that Greene was in custody on March 16, 1977, you were not so sure. Do you have now any further reason to think that Greene may not have actually been behind bars on that date, and may have been roaming the streets? We know his buddy Busch was out. We know Busch lived a little over a mile from the Hunter Maple pharmacy. Can we say for certain that Greene was not there, then?

7. The FBI’s records and files on Chris Busch were all destroyed in a “flood’. Twice. Any record they had on the guy is long gone. So, move along folks, nothing to see here . . .

8. Chris Busch was almost certainly an informant for the FBI on the North Fox Island ring. He may have been an informant for the Michigan State Police on the same thing, or on activities around Flint. If he was connected in any way to the murders of any of the four little kids in Oakland County, then there is no length to which the FBI and the MSP would NOT go to cover that up. And such a cover-up would extend not only through today, but for all time.

9. Chris Busch was connected (via the hair from James Gunnels, a Busch “associate/victim”) to Kristine Mihelich. I believe that when Greg Greene told the Flint PD that Busch had murdered Mark Stebbins, Greene was not making that up of thin air. Greene knew about it because he was in on it (and he, Greene, may have been the principle killer/bad guy), but Busch was connected, somehow. And Greene thought – wrongly – he could make it stick. So that’s Busch and two of the OCCK victims. Patrick Coffey heard Larry Wasser say that Busch confessed to killing your brother, Tim. That’s a connection to three of the kids And if what Alene Strole had to say about the man who approached her is correct, then another of Busch’s “associates”, Greg Greene should be the leading suspect in the abduction/murder of Jill Robinson.

10. There are, admittedly, a few tough issues to resolve:
How does Arch Sloan figure into this? Was he in one of the cars in the parking lot behind the Hunter Maple Pharmacy? (Was he in a 1972/73 Pontiac LeMans with a broken tail light, maybe?)
How in the world did the killer/killers persuade your brother and Kristine and Mark to get into a car after leaving a public place a few blocks from their homes? (Could they have successfully repeated the “show me your school” line on a Sunday? (Mark) Or at night? (your brother) It doesn’t seem very likely. But maybe.)

The abduction of Mark Stebbins had to be a random event because no one could have known that he was going to ask his mother to walk home that Sunday afternoon. The seemingly inept failure to interview/interrogate/track thoroughly the men at the American Legion Hall smacks of a cover-up involving the Ferndale PD. Or, did they do the obvious and talk to those men, except one of them was “connected” to something else, something involving another law enforcement agency?

Mark Stebbins was abducted in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon in a major suburb, adjacent to major streets. Witnesses abounded, if anything violent occurred that attracted attention. Was there a space to grab him and stuff him into a car that would have been unseen by anyone passing by? If the kidnapping was done on one the residential streets in Ferndale, the kidnappers had to be so brazen. That seems impossible.

Again, I don’t have answers to the mechanics of the abductions, but it seems likely to me that the enduring cover-up is at the behest of law enforcement agencies, and the only reason that I can think of is that they want to hide the informant relationship they had once (unwitting, on their part, I hope!) with one or more of the killers.

YES, PAUL!!!! My brother Chris and I have discussed this scenario and versions of it many times.

I don’t think anyone can say with complete certainty that Greg Green was incarcerated when Tim was abducted. His police file has a bunch of handwritten notes which are scrawled in various places. If police are relying today on the shoddy record keeping I saw in Green’s file, no way it is 100%. Green did not have the money Busch did, so odds are he couldn’t post any kind of a bond. Who knows what happened? God knows once he was in prison at Jackson, nobody ever went back and talked to him about the case.

You raise very important questions. Arch Sloan’s Pontiac was used in Mark’s abduction or to transport his body. That’s why the evidence was found in “the Pontiac debris.” Why do you think the police searched his car? Somebody turned him in early on! As those of you from the area probably recall, the police stressed time and again–and for decades–that there was NO evidence in this case. No hairs from a Pontiac; no hair on Kristine’s coat (how about it James/Vince Gunnels?!); no hair in Tim’s mouth or near his groin. It’s easier to explain away not solving a serial murder of children case if you can claim there just simply isn’t any evidence. Liars. Arch Sloan is a very evil, prolific pedophile. How was he involved–especially in Mark’s abduction and murder??? He claimed that he lent his car out to his buddies–go figure, they were pedophiles, too. But whatever his involvement, he’s not talking. And he feels pretty confident about not talking. Clearly has no conscience, so it’s not a problem for him.

Mark Stebbin’s case was clearly botched. You are right–it was a crime of happenstance. Somebody saw him leave the American Legion Hall alone. It had to have happened that way. And, believe it or not, until Wayne County got involved, NOBODY went back and combed over that file to start at square one. You know the abductor(s) and killer(s) names were turned in after Mark went missing. It is likely, I believe, that as police looked into Mark’s case and then the next three murders, there may have been the name of a cop or two that surfaced as being involved in pedophelia and perhaps child pornography. That would have slowed things down big time back then.

So I agree with you about the informant possibility–and that informant could well have been Busch, who was trying to extricate himself from the web of child rape cases he was racking up around the entire state. Don’t forget, Richard Lawson–another pedophile/animal who has since died in jail–was a pedophile who was long an informant for Detroit PD. He and pedophile Ted Lamborgine were convicted in Wayne County about 10 years ago for a reign of terror they inflicted on boys in the Detroit area and nearby suburbs in the 1970’s and ’80’s. Lawson committed these crimes with the imprimatur of the Detroit PD.

At least four men wound up dead under questionable circumstances in 1977 and 1978. Somebody was killing bad guys, perhaps because they believed these freaks would never be convicted. Somebody was trafficking young kids and then four kids wind up dead. Some of these traffickers probably made more money selling kids than selling drugs. Three of these men’s deaths were ruled suicides. I believe anyone who read the police files in these cases would agree that these three cases were murders, not suicides. Richard Hojnaki died right around the time Tim went missing–I think before. Somebody turned him in as the OCCK. John McKinney gets offed in September of 1977. His name was turned in as well. A suburban cop committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the stomach the same week Busch shows up dead in November 1977. Go figure. But nobody digs deep for the very reasons you discuss above. Yes, I believe you are 100% right that the enduring cover-up is at the behest of law enforcement agencies. Can you imagine the horror of realizing your informant has gone rogue and is involved in killing kids? No one from that era had the courage to do the right thing. It is so appalling. Frank Shelden and the Fox Island pedophile criminals victimized probably thousands of boys and were never brought to justice. All this was going on under law enforcement’s nose and nobody does a damn thing. The prosecutor delays charging Shelden so he can flee the country. The failures and ignorance from that era, as well as the current inability to come clean are permanent taints on Michigan law enforcement. If these cases are ever solved, the failures and schemes must be exposed so that there is never a repeat of this horror.

please email me, I have a suspect I don’t feel confident the police are taking seriously. He matched the description put out, according to sources. He is still killing today, and it seems nobody wants to stop him. I’ve tried everything with authorities and have grown incredibly frustrated, was hoping maybe I could converse with you through email and discuss my findings. I really believe he played a role in the OCCK crimes. I HAVE very good reason to believe this.

I think you have the scenario wrong–these kids were abducted with the intention that they would never return home or see the light of day again. But we will never know, because the cops never looked at this kind of scenario.

Hey, cathy, I left an email to you. Sorry it took so long, I haven’t been keeping up on things the way I wish I could. Time constraints and all. I hope within it you can find something worthwhile. What is important is he connects directly to the Cox officer and the Bennett’s, the Bennett’s VERY much so. He also roughly matched the composite sketch according to family members around the time of the incidents.

Do you have further information on Berkley PD officer Chris Flynn or of Officers Krussel or Cox? What you wrote a couple of years ago was very tantalizing, especially the bit about the possibility that a witness saw a car like his near the drop-off site for Mark Stebbins.
Can you post the police report on Flynn’s death please? I want to read what the Berkley PD had to say about the obviously suspicious death of a fellow officer.

Your brother Chris’s statement that the blue Gremlin/Vega was still in the parking lot hours later is key. The Pontiac LeMans was deliberately obscured to hide something – it belonged to someone that the authorities were reluctant to identify.

Other than John McKinney’s strange manner of death, is there other evidence that might link him to all this?

Like your brother Chris, with whom I was very slightly acquainted, I am a 1979 graduate of Seaholm. I too had a brother who was 12 when Mark was murdered, a sister 12 when Jill was murdered, and another sister who turned 10 four months after Kristine was murdered. My parents still live in Birmingham. Those places and neighborhoods are in our DNA. The undeserved horror suffered by your family haunts those of us who realize it was only random luck that kept it from happening to us.

I remember that time and those places well. For many of us from that era, your story terrifies us still.

These crimes had such a profound impact on tens of thousands of people–kids, kids who became parents, young adults, young adults who became parents, brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents–so many of us. The list never ends. Which makes it more appalling that Oakland County and the Michigan State Police stayed silent in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt in the case of numerous suspects. Just let it go away; the wealthy can’t deal with this shit. Paul, I’m sorry–99% of my life, including the six huge bins of notebooks concerning this case, are in storage during a transition until at least late-October. So for the short-term, I can’t post anything on Flynn, Krussel or Cox. These agencies kept piss-poor records, but what they stupidly kept is still interesting. McKinney–oh Jesus, really? It’s hard to know where to start. Suffice it to say, without my documents, that the guy was more than trouble and he is goddamn lucky somebody offed him before his history was revealed. Live or work near B’ham–you get a pass. Unless you are an 11-year-old kid.

I was wondering where i might find the news articles about North fox island ,the only ones i have seen i found accidentally on a british site , and it did not mention that chris busch was the photographer , and that expands the story for me , it was probably lucrative as he knew the market , and who was this General Motors photographer ? is he still alive ? and if he is he would still be active, as the only cure is death, he would still be offending . this may have been a business for them and would have disbursed the pictures and film videos, they may still exist among collectors and law enforce ment. i wonder if someone with knowledge of these computer comunities could do some online search .